Termination Analysis of Java Bytecode

Abstract. Termination analysis has received considerable attention, traditionally in the context of declarative programming, and recently also for imperative languages. In existing approaches, termination is performed on source programs. However, there are many situations, including mobile code, where only the compiled code is available. In this work we present an automatic termination analysis for sequential Java Bytecode programs. Such analysis presents all of the challenges of analyzing a low-level language as well as those introduced by object-oriented languages. Interestingly, given a bytecode program, we produce a constraint logic program, CLP, whose termination entails termination of the bytecode program. This allows applying the large body of work in termination of CLP programs to termination of Java bytecode. A prototype analyzer is described and initial experimentation is reported.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: FMOODS
• Authors: Elvira Albert, Puri Arenas, Michael Codish, Samir Genaim, Germán Puebla, Damiano Zanardini
• Keywords: Bytecode Program, FMOODS 2008, Formal Methods, Java Bytecode, Termination Analysis